In This Town
by Tolakasa
Summary: AU, preseries. Her name was Marjeya. Mary didn't exist until the day she met him.


**In This Town**

Mary Chamberlin didn't exist until the day she met him.

Marjeya was tracking a pack of vampires when her truck died in the middle of Kansas, and it wouldn't respond to anything she did. It was inconvenient, but it had been fifty thousand miles since the last major breakdown, and it _was_ getting on in years.

The first six mechanics did everything but pat her on the head. (The seventh actually did, which earned him a broken wrist.) Two tried to tell her she needed a complete engine rebuild; three claimed she needed a new transmission; the last declared the truck a total loss but conveniently had a cousin who sold used cars.

The eighth implied that he could fix the car in exchange for certain favors. She introduced him to her favorite knife and left him with a new respect for womanhood, though sadly she had to leave him largely intact.

Nine was her lucky number. Polite. No leering. Took half the time to declare a problem half as expensive.

His name was John, according to the patch on his coveralls. He'd seen service; she knew a soldier when she saw one, even if he was covered in grease. Vet, not too long removed from war, if she was any judge. Someone without her experience in assessing vulnerabilities might have missed the slight stiffness on one side—a sure sign that he was compensating for an old wound, and trying his best to hide it. Not an incapacitating wound, not anymore, just slow in healing.

And not once did he try to drool into her cleavage.

It would have been easier to walk away if he'd been like the other idiots in Lawrence, not focused on anything beyond his next beer or his next lay. But he seemed so...so _nice._ Oh, rough around the edges, to be sure, but that was par for the course for soldiers, especially ones that had been hurt.

Soldiers and _stac'he_ were more similar than not.

"Chamberlin" was the name she gave him; she hadn't even remembered what this week's alias was, requested her truck by model, year, and color, the way she always did. When he—still oh-so-politely—addressed her as "Mrs. Chamberlin," for some reason, she corrected him.

It was the ring on her finger that had confused him. The _stac'hera_, wide and made of blessed silver, symbol of her calling to those who knew enough to read it. There was no law dictating which hand to wear it on, so she wore it on her left, where it was easily mistaken for a wedding band, because men in the wider world tended not to listen to single women. Especially frail-looking blondes who walked into gun stores and garages alone.

Some men, out here in the world, wouldn't listen to a pretty blonde if she had a shotgun shoved up his nose. She'd learned that the hard way.

She paid for the repairs, and he asked her out—almost shyly, which was rather adorable, considering the gruff-soldier exterior. He reminded her of uncle Jamie's friend Bill. She'd had a huge crush on old Bill when she was younger; he was the first non-_stac'he_ she'd gotten to know.

Maybe that was why she said yes.

She never meant to stay. It wasn't like she hadn't met other men in her years on the road. _Stac'he_ were forbidden marriage, but there was no law against liaisons, so long as no children were born. The elders weren't _that_ stupid.

But two weeks after she hit Lawrence, she found herself giving up the motel and its disapproving biddy of an owner for a cheap apartment with a leering landlord, a waitressing job, and a blank notebook, in which she set down the story of her new life. She told John it was a journal, and it wasn't a complete lie: it was the inner story of a woman who had never before existed, the woman called Mary, a woman who had led a perfectly normal, if somewhat nomadic, life.

Marjeya had a creative streak that no amount of training had ever beaten out of her.

John didn't ask about her scars, though sometimes she saw the questions in his eyes when he ran his fingers over them. But she never asked about his, and he respected that. He was a soldier. He knew how personal scars could be.

And he quit asking about her family the day he found her crying over the letter.

There was no way to explain it to him. No way to tell a man who missed his parents the way John did that she knew hers only by name. That due to an accident of population—because no boy had been born at the proper time, into the proper family, for the betrothal rites to take place—she was given to the ranks of the _stac'he_, to be raised and trained as a hunter of the undead and demonic. That at eighteen she had been sent into the wider world, to survive as long as she could, hunting and saving in reparation for what the elders had to take from this world to keep their people alive.

No way to explain to him that the _stac'hera_ was as much a tracking device as a symbol, that the elders had used their powers to see why she had quit moving, and had given her the standard ultimatum: move on or be banished. Only another of her people could have told him that it wasn't losing the calling that hurt, not even losing those she knew, but losing the right to return. Her people were the children of their environment, tied to the earth and air and water of the valley where they were born. For that—not for family or calling—she wept.

But the pain was not enough to make her leave.

Three months after their first date, they exchanged vows before a justice of the peace. She bought a blue shirt for the occasion, because John said she looked good in blue, and neither one of them was inclined to get much more dressed up than that. The ring he bought her was gold. It held no blessings and no inscriptions; just a plain wedding band, the way they wore them here in the wider world.

The night before the ceremony, she burned the letter, putting it in the bonfire with everything but her new clothes, her notebook, and the _stac'hera_; it held minor magics, magics she did not trust in the hands of strangers, so she put it into safekeeping, with vague thoughts of someday giving it to one of her children. The weapons and her truck she sold, putting the money into the savings account for the down payment on their future home.

With that fire, she burned Marjeya. There would be only Mary.

Mary Chamberlin Winchester.

**_the end_**


End file.
